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For most of a century, the detached home has been the American ideal, and land use laws were crafted to match, foster, and nurture this ideal. But cracks are starting to form. Today, I don't focus on the usual suspects – high gas prices, traffic, suburban alienation, or the attractive buzz of the city. Rather, I’ll focus on the observation that appeal of the “lawn” – a place to plant flowers, toss a football, or shoot the breeze with a beer and a lawn chair – may be dying out. First, here’s a story about the growing popularity of rowhouses in the Chicago suburbs. Unlike detached houses, these smaller, yard-less houses have kept most of their value over the past couple of years, unlike big detached houses. There are telling quotes from buyers who don’t mind the lack of a yard and appreciate the lower price. (Meanwhile, isn’t it interesting that developers are marketing them as “rowhouses?” A generation ago, a “rowhouse” conjured up unfavorable images of working class folks on the stoops in t-shirts in a declining urban neighborhood, while “townhouse” seemed much more posh. Today, with “townhouses” having sprouted up adjacent to strip malls in many suburbs, the word “rowhouse” now connotes a certain neo-urban chic. Expect developers to market suburban “tenements” by 2011 …) Then, there’s this story the extraordinary amount of time that the typical American teen spends texting. From my generation, I ask: When do they get time to wander the malls if they’re always texting? I suppose they do it at the same time. For their generation, for whom most waking hours are spent looking at a screen of some kind (phone, computer, TV), what good is a yard? Will governments begin to craft land use laws with a presumption that rowhouses are as acceptable for new zoning as detached houses? And finally, here’s a story about a nearly vacant development of expensive detached homes in Homestead, an exurb at the very southern edge (hence the name) of the Miami metro area. Imagine, in a growing Sunbelt mega-metro, pinned in on all sides by sea and protected wetlands, a housing development going unsold! Perhaps the houses will be snatched up once the economy improves; but it also makes one think that maybe these houses should be torn down and replaced with exurban rowhouses …